This conference examines labor-related issues in California and US agriculture. Labor-intensive fruit and vegetable crops are almost 85 percent of California and 40 percent of US crop sales, farm worker employment has been increasing, and the state’s mostly unauthorized farm workers are aging and settling in one place with families that include US-born children.

The National Agricultural Worker Survey (NAWS) began to interview workers employed on crop farms in calendar year 1988, and has interviewed over 70,000 workers in the past three decades. This conference examines NAWS and other farm labor data. Presenters are asked to consider (1) whether the NAWS methodology of multi-stage sampling to account for seasonal and regional fluctuations in farm employment or other aspects of the survey’s design need to be modified, and (2) whether the NAWS questionnaire should be modified to collect better or additional data.

Immigrants to America have long had a history of anglicizing Jewish, Polish and Russian names for the sake of fitting in. More recently, research on labor market discrimination show prospective employers do not necessarily discriminate against resumes with Asian names, but they are more likely to call back resumes with Anglicized Asian names rather than non-Anglicized ones. Fan Lu designs a conjoint experiment that tests whether White voters exhibit a similar preference for what she calls "ethnic-lite" political candidates.

As US policymakers struggle to find a policy solution to address the restrictions on legal immigration that lead to undocumented immigration, deportations have become a reality affecting lives of millions of immigrants and local communities.

In this talk, Assistant Professor Stacy Fahrenthold examines the politics of Syrian and Lebanese migration during the First World War. Examining how empires at war—from the Ottomans to the French—claimed emigrants abroad as part of the state-building process, Fahrenthold argues they transformed this diaspora into an epicenter for Arab nationalist politics.

In this project, Professor Joanna Regulska argues that IDPs use memory, acts of ‘re-membering’, in order to attain and maintain a state of mobility. She explores the relationship between memory and place-making (a practice of building ties with a place). She focuses on the agency of displaced persons as they act to overcome the experience of dis-placement and retain or regain the symbolic ties to home and homeland through their memories.

The Conversation is a public event series hosted by the UC Davis Humanities Institute that invites professors and public intellectuals to consider current issues of the day.

This paper by Yaxi Chen approaches the impact of China's booming housing market in the past 15 years, with a focus on the impact of the capital crowding out effect on other productive sectors, and possible labor reallocation across different sectors.

Mary Crock presents her book: "The Legal Protection Of Refugees With Disabilities" at the “The Legal Protection of Vulnerable Migrants: Comparative Case Studies of Children and Refugees with Disabilities” seminar on October 25th.

Professor Brad Jones will share his experiences in providing humanitarian efforts on the border as well as discuss the migrant death crisis more generally in the context of U.S. immigration policy.